42
~ AKELLA ~
The only thing worse than being stuck behind the walls of a landlocked city was being stuck behind the walls of a landlocked city surrounded by fanatically patriotic Imperial fools who believed the gods themselves had preordained their victory.
Gods never preordained anything. They gave their mortal children enough rope to tie either a sail or a noose, then stood back to see what would happen.
That was how Akella saw it, anyway.
She stood on the tiny balcony of the tiny cell of a room the Commander had so graciously granted her when the Empress moved her personal battalion into the gigantic castle that dominated Pellon’s eastern edge. Unlike all the other rooms Akella had seen in the castle, hers had the unique characteristic of locking from the outside. Of course.
She’d let out a low whistle when the Commander had first opened the room’s door and waved her inside. “Impressive. What was it before the war – a broom closet?”
The Commander had only pursed her lips.
“Are you sure you want me to have this?” Akella had asked. “This one is so… quaint. And is that a balcony I spy? Aren’t you sure there’s not some nice, cozy dungeon in the bowels of this castle you’d rather me have?”
“It’s not the room I wanted you to have. It’s the one the Empress wanted you to have,” the Commander said. “It belonged to a Wise Man. He’s dead now. Like the lord he served.”
“Lovely. Killed just inside, I suppose?” Akella gestured vaguely at the interior. A narrow bed was pushed against one wall, a narrow writing desk against the other. About two feet stretched in between them.
The Commander shrugged. “I’ll let you settle in.”
“Settle in what?” Akella said. “I left a brothel six months ago with the clothes on my back and nothing more. I don’t have anything to settle.”
“Then I guess it won’t take you very long,” said the Commander. She turned away.
Bloody concubine,Akella thought now, elbows on the balcony’s rail. Got myself injured fighting for the bloody Empire and she still doesn’t trust me.
In truth, Akella admitted to herself, she hadn’t exactly been fighting to protect the Empress or the Empire. She’d fought the day of the raid to impress Megs. That, however, was beside the point. An injury was an injury – Akella had shed blood for the Empire, and that should’ve been enough for the Commander.
She reviewed a mental list of her grievances against the Empress, one she added to every so often. First, rather than simply ask if she would guide them to the Kingdom of Persopos, they’d ripped her from bed one morning, thrown her in a dungeon, and threatened her family. Then Akella saved the Empress’s gods-damned fleet – and the Empress and her concubine – when the shite-for-brains Imperial captain sailed them straight into a hurricane. Most recently, she’d saved the lives of several soldiers during the raid on the Empress’s camp, and what payment did she get? A concussion and several days in the infirmary.
A simple thank you would have been nice. Well, alright, so the Empress did personally thank her profusely after the hurricane, but that was beside the point. Akella was still a guest treated like a captive.
Though she did have this tiny little room with its tiny little balcony. She had to admit her accommodations were better than what most of the common soldiers had. Maybe it was the Empress’s way of showing her appreciation after all. Elsewhere in the castle, Eagle Battalion’s soldiers were crammed into whatever nook or cranny could be found for them. Bedrolls laid side-by-side in empty stable stalls, inside corridors, pushed to one side in a kitchen. The castle’s great hall, with its four fireplaces and grand oak tables, which in better times had probably been used to entertain all manner of visiting dignitaries, had been converted into a giant dormitory for an odd assortment of Wise Men, sorcerers, and the Empress’s black clad guards.
Megs and her squad were somewhere inside, too, but Akella wasn’t sure where. The Commander herself had appeared from nowhere as Akella entered the castle with the first sergeant’s squad and whisked her up to her private dead Wise Man’s cell.
Despite having her own room in the castle’s heart, and despite the fact that the Imperial Army simply walked into Pellon and its castle without shedding a single drop of blood, Akella felt uneasy. Perhaps she was uneasy because taking Pellon was so easy. She hadn’t forgotten that Megs insisted the mountain men wouldn’t give Pellon up without a fight, so their absence was certainly conspicuous.
But perhaps Akella’s uneasiness was simpler than all that. As she gazed out at the distant mountains, which had an ominous, predatory look to them, she realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had gone so long without seeing the ocean. Everything about the East felt wrong to Akella’s islander sensibilities. There was just so much land and so little water.
Granted, there was a river west of the city – they’d crossed it with a damaged stone bridge along the Emperor’s Road – but it was a sluggish, shallow thing that was frozen through anyway. It hardly counted as water. And then there were the snow-capped mountains she was currently staring at. Megs had explained to her that the Sunrise Mountains were a good thirty or forty miles east of Pellon, but they certainly didn’t look it. If anything, the mountains looked closer this morning than they had last night, as though they’d crept nearer while the humans below slept. The range’s peaks looked like huge, broken teeth poised to swallow the city and everything in it whole – a great, land-based shark slowly circling ever-closer to its prey.
A grey dawn attempted to illuminate the sky beyond the range, as if striving to live up to the name sunrise, but the snowcapped peaks blocked whatever rays of sunlight might be trying to brighten what was sure to be a dismal day. Snow had been falling when they arrived the evening prior. Judging by the layer of white blanketing the castle’s battlements, the city wall beyond, and the blackened hamlet beyond that, the snow must have fallen all night. It didn’t seem to be snowing now; a few flurries swirled now and again, but that could just be the wind stirring what had already fallen. No boot prints or brown patches broke up the endless sea of white, which suggested to Akella that neither Imperial troops nor mountain men had ventured into it since the snowstorm abated.
She sighed and ducked back inside the ridiculously small room, rubbing both arms vigorously to encourage warmth back into them. She should be in a better mood. After all, she’d just spent a full week traveling by Megs’s side. They’d spent the journey talking about everything from ships to farm animals – Akella had even made the first sergeant laugh a few times, which had not been an easy feat. When they arrived in Pellon, Akella had been almost sad to see the wet, cold, miserably muddy voyage come to an end.
If she hadn’t already been before the march to Pellon, Akella was now dangerously besotted with Megs. Her initial attraction might have been explained away as simply the challenge of a conquest, of winning over someone who had so adamantly rejected her attention, but something had changed. It wasn’t about the conquest anymore. In contrast to the dead winter white everywhere around them, something warm and green was blossoming inside Akella’s heart. It had been as frozen as the Eastern wasteland since the day she left her crew behind in Persopos, but now it was beginning to thaw. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this way for a woman, this reckless, thrilling, half-frightening feeling, like being in a ship that just crested a wave and now plunged down the other side at stomach-dropping speed.
And Akella had won her bet. They hadn’t seen a single mountain man on the way to Pellon, nor a single sign of them once they arrived. That meant Akella could court Megs officially now. Though Megs probably wouldn’t admit it, Akella suspected she would have let herself be courted even if she hadn’t lost the bet.
So given her victory with Megs, why did Akella feel so suffocated? Why did she feel both heavily gloomy and twitchingly anxious at the same time? Was it really just the prospect of spending the winter inside this cramped room within the cramped castle, surrounded by dead fields and hungry mountains?
She picked up the overcoat she’d dropped on her cell’s little writing desk the night before and slipped it on. The Commander had given it to her about eight weeks earlier, when the temperatures first began to drop, just before she’d traveled north to take charge of First Division. The coat didn’t fit Akella properly, but the outside was oiled leather, the inside lined with a layer of goose down and then quilted with thick wool, so despite its loose fit, it had at least managed to keep her warm and mostly dry during the journey here.
Akella snarled to herself as she left the room, annoyed once more to see the lock designed for the outside of the door.
The corridor outside the cell was almost as narrow as the cell itself. A long rug ran its length, and lanterns burning at half strength provided a sickly, dim light. Despite the lack of space for soldiers, Akella seemed to be the sole occupant of the floor. A single black-clad guard, looking bored and sleepy, stood at one end of the hallway, where stairs spiraled both downward to the floor below and upward to the battlements. Akella and the guard nodded to one another but said nothing.
She picked a direction at random, no particular destination in mind – she would go anywhere so long as it got her away from the suffocating cell of the dead Wise Man. Perhaps enough wandering about would lead her back to Megs.
Akella explored for a time, acquainting herself with the twists and turns of Castle Pellon, from the battlements that overlooked the city to the mostly empty storage rooms lining either side of the kitchens. Everything bore the scars of a year of occupation. Like careless tenants, the mountain men had left behind empty cupboards, broken furniture, torn tapestries, and graffitied walls inside the castle; outside the castle, the city of Pellon was a half-burnt ruin. Soldiers squatted in buildings that had holes in their roofs and walls, and scorch marks across nearly every floor.
Despite wandering every inch of the castle and its grounds at least twice, from dawn until mid-morning, when the sun had finally clawed its way over the mountains to wake Pellon and its inhabitants, Akella didn’t manage to run across Megs, any member of Megs’s ten-man squad, or Linna.
That she couldn’t find Megs wasn’t terribly surprising; sometimes the squad pulled night shifts and slept until nearly the noontide meal. But Linna’s absence was puzzling. And somewhat concerning. Like Akella, the girl was an early riser, and although she liked to act as though she was well above Akella and her criminal ways, Akella knew it was no accident that Linna managed to find her nearly every day.
Yet during the entire week-long journey to Pellon, Akella had only caught fleeting glimpses of the Empress’s favorite servant. At one point, Akella bumped into Linna on one of the nasty, rainy days in the middle of their trek, but the little seagull was harried, closed-mouthed, and barely acknowledged Akella. Rumors had circulated through the common soldiers during the march that there was something terribly wrong with the Empress – the speculation was that she’d either gone mad or fallen deathly ill or both – and Linna’s behavior certainly did nothing to dispel those speculations.
Akella hadn’t seen Linna since then, and that was at least four days ago. As she wandered the castle, she kept expecting to come across the girl and the Commander flowing through the moves of their “dance” inside some private inner courtyard, but each courtyard she found was silent and cold, covered in the same unmarred snow that covered everything else.
While she didn’t find Linna, Akella did find the Empress’s quarters. They turned out to be almost directly beneath Akella’s own room, which somehow didn’t surprise her. Akella didn’t actually see the Empress, but the floor below hers was an ornate, vaulted hallway, both broader and brighter than her own dim corridor, and it was an overturned ant’s nest of soldiers wearing the black armor of the Empress’s personal guard. It occurred to Akella that this explained why there was a guard at the end of her own corridor – she’d thought he was there to watch her, but he was probably stationed to block access to the stairway leading to the Empress’s hallway below.
Strange that the Commander surrounded the Empress with so many guards now that they were within the safety of the castle. Akella would have thought the guards would have been put to better use elsewhere. Maybe the guards weren’t to keep others out, but the Empress in. What if the rumors were right and she’d finally gone mad?
Akella shrugged to herself. No matter. The state of the Empress and her concubine were not her concern.
She took a nap mid-morning, mainly because she was bored but also because she was sleep-deprived, then left again and followed the smells of food until she came across the noontide meal being served in one of the castle’s large outer courtyards. Bleary-eyed soldiers holding a hodgepodge of clay, wood, and pewter bowls stood listlessly in a line that extended out of the tent and all the way around the corner to the blacksmith’s stall. Akella started to join them, but the back of one soldier’s head caught her eye. She smiled and bypassed the back of the queue, ignoring the grumbled complaints coming from behind her as she pushed her way forward to that familiar dark braid of hair.
“Oi, Sergeant,” she said cheerily, tapping Megs on the shoulder.
Megs turned away from the soldier she’d been talking to, a boy Akella recognized as being one of the members of her squad.
Megs’s appearance was startling. They’d only been separated for sixteen or eighteen hours, but the sergeant must not have slept at all in that time. Bruise-like purple bags hung beneath each eye, and her winter-pale olive skin was even paler than it had been the last time Akella had seen her. She had so little color she was practically chalky.
“Oi, pirate.” Her weary voice was heavy.
“You look like you haven’t slept.”